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Reviewing Jonathan Rose’s The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor, Michael F. Bishop appreciates the insights offered by approaching Sir Winston through the writing he both produced and loved:

Like Abraham Lincoln, the greatest statesman of the 19th century, Winston Churchill, the greatest of the 20th, had a genius for language. But unlike Lincoln, Churchill made a lucrative living as an author, inflating both his bank balance and his reputation with prodigious (and shrewdly self-promoting) feats of literary craftsmanship. In this sometimes speculative but immensely enjoyable biography, Jonathan Rose shows that Churchill’s authorial and political careers were entwined and inseparable. And he convincingly argues that while “tracking down literary influences is often dismissed as a purely academic exercise . . . sometimes the lives of millions depend on what their rulers read.”

According to Rose, Churchill was principally driven in life by “the desire to frame a thrilling story” for himself, and “once we understand that as his life goal, then Churchill’s impulsive courtship of danger becomes predictable, explicable, and eminently reasonable.” To Rose, his performance on the world stage was influenced in part by the theater, especially the Victorian melodrama of his youth. This sense of life as a drama, with him in the starring role, prompted both rash judgments and acts of dazzling courage. While a more prosaic outlook might have helped him avoid misadventures, it would have deprived Britain of its “finest hour” in 1940.

In an earlier take on the book, Sam Leith had more on how Churchill’s flair for the dramatic helped  him understand Hitler’s rise:

Rose paints Churchill as a man in love with the bold stroke — the coup de théâtre — and mired in a view of the world as Victorian melodrama. While the fractured categories and stalled certainties of modernism were making the literary weather, Churchill looked backwards. His was a world of clear identities, dramatic reversals and good triumphing pluckily over evil. His ideas of everything from Irish Home Rule to the government of native populations in India are credited with having been formed by the view from the cheap seats. He spoke claptrap — which, as Rose tells us more than once, is a term from melodrama: the inspiring speech the hero makes with his back to the wall, trapping the audience into applause.

This is the stopped-clock version of how Churchill got the fascists right: Hitler was one type of melodramatic villain (dark, shouty, moustachioed); Mussolini (treacherous, semi-comic) another. It just happened that silly old Winston, who sonorously predicted the final crisis of western civilisation once a week or so, happened to coincide with the real thing. Rose’s dimmish view of Churchill seeps up like ground-water. He presents him as an egotistical lunatic obsessed with being remembered as one of the great men of history, heedless of who died to make that dream come true, and with a script for achieving it based, more or less, on a bunch of babyish Victorian pantos.

(Image: Churchill waves to crowds in Whitehall on the day he broadcast to the nation that the war with Germany had been won, 8 May 1945, via Wikimedia Commons)

Michael Byrne explains what happens:

It’s tempting to look at bacteria as a kind of binary realm, with “good” and the “bad” sorts that have good and bad impacts on health, when it’s really not that easy. Our own personal bacterial flora might help keep harmful bacteria at bay through competitive pressure, but the goodness of these tiny helpers is less a function of benevolence than geography – set them loose elsewhere in the body, beyond the inner-outside of the digestive tract, and very bad things will happen. A different set of bad things awaits a host with just a bit too much or too little friendly bacteria, ranging from cancer to inflammatory bowel diseases. While it’s possible to live without gut flora, such an existence portends a wide variety of troubles.

One fascinating aspect of this would-be dualism is how the bacteria that we provisionally know as friendly and harmful interact with each other. We know well enough that our gut flora help us out with immunity and keeping virulent bacterial invaders at bay, but it’s hardly because of some secret intraspecies armistice. A study out [last] week in the journal PLOS ONE examines the response of gut flora (in mice) to colitis-causing bacterial infection elsewhere in the body, finding that our own personal colonies of helper bacteria get sick themselves in a very real sense. It’s an observation that paves the way for not just better understandings of bacterial interrelationships, but also “early warning” tools for diseases.

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Nathan Rabin, who coined the term “manic pixie dream girl” in a 2007 essay, regrets it and wants to retire the term:

In an interview with Vulture, “Ruby Sparks” writer-star Zoe Kazan answered a question about whether her character was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl by asserting: “I think it’s basically misogynist.” … Here’s the thing: I completely agree with Kazan. And at this point in my life, I honestly hate the term too. I feel deeply weird, if not downright ashamed, at having created a cliché that has been trotted out again and again in an infinite Internet feedback loop. I understand how someone could read the A.V. Club list of Manic Pixie Dream Girls and be offended by the assertion that a character they deeply love and have an enduring affection for, whether it’s Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall or Katharine Hepburn in “Bringing Up Baby,” is nothing more than a representation of a sexist trope or some sad dude’s regressive fantasy.

But Lisa Knisley defends the term as an “intensely useful and important” way of describing a real element of our culture, not just movies and TV:

The ability to shorthand what seemed to be a pervasive and powerful cultural ideal of white femininity embodied by the on-screen MPDG has been invaluable as I came to feminist consciousness and began to more deeply analyze the representations of femininity marketed to my generation. But, more than that, the concept of the MPGD doesn’t just describe a gendered film trope—it helps me make sense of non-fictional gender relations as well.

I’d be hard-pressed to say I’ve ever met a real-life MPDG, of course. Flesh and blood women, no matter how they come off at first, are inevitably more complex and substantial than the superficial waifs of our collective pop culture fantasies. Still, for women of my generation, perhaps especially middle-class, heterosexual, white women, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is one powerful version of our ideal selves and many of us have found ourselves emulating her, wanting to become her.

Elisabeth Donnelly stakes out a middle position, arguing that Rabin’s initial diagnosis of the MPDG was valuable but agreeing with him now that it has become an cliché catch-all for lazy critics:

Where Rabin’s trope started to feel cruel was in the semi-pointless appellation of “manic pixie.” Perhaps it was applicable to the female characters in Garden State and Elizabethtown, but would you really call anyone else a manic pixie, beyond, say, Tinkerbell? In all honesty, when it comes to writing about half-baked, terrible characters in art, we need to use a broader range of terms beyond just slotting all wispy girlfriends into the Natalie Portman-in-Garden State slot. Go deeper. Write with more eloquence about why the character is underwritten, why the lack of an interesting woman in a movie is a problem. Pin it on the follies of the art.

Previous Dish on the MPDG here, here, and here.

Reviewing the exhibition “Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino: Diverging Paths of Mannerism” at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Barry Schwabsky applauds the works of Rosso Fiorentino for displaying “truly bad taste.” He argues that “whatever is cringe-inducing in Rosso’s pictures is more or less inextricable from what sometimes makes them so breathtaking”:

Rosso [aka “Florentine Red”] offended established taste almost from the get-go. Vasari tells us that the young artist wouldn’t stay with any master, “having a certain opinion of his own that conflicted with their manners.” Commissioned in 1518 to paint an altarpiece, he invited the patron, Leonardo di Giovanni Buonafede, to view the work in progress; alas, “the Saints appeared to him like devils,” according to Vasari, and so “the patron fled from his house and would not have the picture, saying that the painter had cheated him.”

The work, Madonna and Child With Four Saints, also known as the Spedalingo Altarpiece, was exiled to a small provincial church, where it slumbered until the nineteenth century; in 1900, it was admitted to the collection of the Uffizi and has now moved across town for the Palazzo Strozzi exhibition. As David Franklin writes in the catalog, the learned Carthusian who was so horrified by Rosso’s painting thus far “was a prolifically experienced if conservative patron of altarpieces” whose “reaction, although vehement, was well-informed.”

Schwabsky goes on to describe what makes the painting so unnerving:

Most demoniac in appearance is the harsh and wasted figure of St. Jerome on the right. Franklin suggests that the red-haired St. John on the left—the artist’s namesake, and the only one of the painting’s figures (aside from the infant Christ and the sweetly earnest cherubs at Mary’s feet) who doesn’t appear to be an emanation of the blue shadows swirling around the Madonna’s legs—is Rosso’s way of announcing that the painting was intended as his “impassioned personal contribution to the hothouse atmosphere of Florence in the first two decades of the 16th century.” I shouldn’t wonder. In any case, despite Vasari’s claim that it was all a misunderstanding and that Rosso intended to “sweeten the expressions” of the saints in the process of finishing the painting, they retain to this day the “savage and desperate air” that drove the poor churchman running from Rosso’s door.

(Image of Madonna Enthroned with Four Saints by Rosso, 1518, via Wikimedia Commons)

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Lynn Vavreck sees it as hazardous for Hillary Clinton:

This is the danger for Mrs. Clinton in running a quasi-campaign instead of a real campaign and holding off on discussing the things she would do as president if she were to run and win. She risks campaigning in a low-information environment of her own making. And that means that instead of debating whether her tax policies would help the middle class, we are left to talk about whether her conception of herself as not “truly well-off” or “dead broke” means she cannot relate to the middle class. Instead of asking what qualities she would favor in nominating justices to the Supreme Court, we instead focus on whether she hid or changed her public position on gay equality over the decades because it was politically expedient.

My deeper worry is that this kind of blah blah tour is where Clinton is most comfortable. Because she does actually and rather aggressively suck at politics itself:

Consider that Clinton has run in three elections. Her two wins in New York are not all that impressive, really. Instead of facing the powerful and well-funded Rudy Giuliani in 2000, who withdrew for health reasons, she was up against Representative Rick Lazio. Lazio only entered the race five months before it ended. And in her re-election in 2006, the New York GOP let a Yonkers mayor, John Spencer, be the sacrificial lamb…

And of course she lost the only electoral race where she faced a credible opponent. In the 2008 race for the Democratic nomination she blew a massive early lead. One of the only reasons she did not get completely pasted by Barack Obama was his horrible off-the-record flub about rural voters “clinging to their guns and religion.” Clinton immediately invented a strategy later used by the Tea Party and Glenn Beck of trying to tar Obama as an alien and radical. In their April 16 debate in Pennsylvania, she tried to highlight Obama’s “relationship with Reverend Farrakhan” and portray him as a supporter of Hamas. This strategy failed utterly.

If I were a Democrat, I’d worry about her useless stump speeches, her increasingly regal and dynastic affect, her lack of any appreciable political instincts, and her propensity to regard herself as a beleaguered victim. Apart from all that, I couldn’t be more impressed.