"Arts & Letters" (Spring 2010) is one the better issues of Lapham's Quarterly, up there with "War", "Eros", "Medicine" and "Learning". Anyone interested in literature, painting, music, architecture will find this mixture of classic, famous and insightful selections a real joy to read, and a guide for exploring more. This is my 10th issue of Lapham's and although not a Great Books education, it is perhaps a taste. Below are some of my favorite selections.

Leo Tolstoy from What is Art? (1898) says that art is the process of conveying ones own feelings to others so they may experience the same. T.S. Eliot explains how dead artists influence the living, but more importantly, how living artists change how the dead are perceived. Vitruvious from On Architecture (25BC) says that manual skill and theoretical knowledge are complimentary, and in an artist, one without the other is lesser than the whole. Victor Hugo in an excerpt from Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) shows how architecture has been the writing instrument of man, each stone block a letter, each building a sentence. Stefan Zweig in The World of Yesterday (1943) remembers what it was like first learning about classic authors, rushing to the library to look up and read every new name and idea he came across.

Kurt Vonnegut gives an insightful lecture on the basic forms of storytelling. Richard Nixon and Elvis meet in a hilarious Whitehouse transcript from 1970 - Elvis volunteers to help uncover drug-using hippies. Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Spanish Dancer" (1908) is a short but hot read. George Orwell from "Politics and the English Language" (1947) famously shows how language is being subverted for political ends. Alexander Pope in An Essay on Criticism (1711) gives perhaps one of the most poetic and truthful skewering of art critics ever conceived, "Those half-learned witlings, as numerous in our isle / As half-formed insects on the banks of the Nile."

Zadie Smith in On Beauty (2005) shows what's it's like to be a naive but devoted freshman in college, at once learning new things while old myths are destroyed. Andy Warhol from POPism (1980) remembers when he first became famous. Lee Quinones recalls spray painting subway cars in NYC in the 1970s. Ovid, from Metamorphoses (5AD), tells the story of Pygmalion. Maxim Gorky recalls seeing his first moving picture in 1896, "It darts like an arrow straight toward you - watch out!"

Of the four original essays, my favorite is by Jamie James called "In The Gloom The Gold", a short biography of Ezra Pound. Imagine running into this character, even today: "He would wear trousers of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie handpainted by a Japanese friend, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard cut to a point, and a single, large blue earing."

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2010 cc-by-nd ( )