Good morning, everyone. First up: Christopher Tayler writes judiciously about the life and work of John Williams: “There’s a streak of self-pity in Williams’s later books too, and a tendency to dramatise worries about universal futility in close conjunction with worries about women and sex. Shields’s biography doesn’t leave much mystery around this sort of apposition (Williams was ‘traditionally minded’ when it came to gender roles and wasn’t happy when his department came under pressure to hire more women in the 1960s), or about the reason he stopped publishing (alcohol got the better of him). But there’s still some mystery about the way he taught himself to write so well that, nearly sixty years later, Stoner – in which a middle-aged professor, hounded by his cold, spiteful wife and a department chair who’s almost literally a malevolent dwarf, finds a few fleeting moments of happiness in the arms of an attractive PhD student – can still be read as a luminous artefact of mid-century American realism rather than a mawkish, self-vindicating fantasy.”

How Rembrandt became Rembrandt: “This year (2019) commemorates the 350th anniversary of Rembrandt’s death. It has been marked by numerous exhibitions. ‘Young Rembrandt: Rising Star’, now showing at the Museum de Lakenhal in Leiden, will come to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in February 2020. Both the exhibition and this book pose the same question: how did Rembrandt become Rembrandt? How did a miller’s son from a provincial city in Holland, born at the dawn of the 17th century, become one of the most famous painters in the world? Both seek the answer in his native city of Leiden.”

The toy piano as musical instrument: “The toy piano is an avant-garde musician’s dream. It’s the accidental instrument that was never meant to see anything but oncoming erratic toddler movements; it was never meant to feel anything but the thumping of tiny fists and grubby fingers. It has no musical baggage, no weighty historical performance practice, no standard repertoire. It has nothing to hold you back, to tell you you’re doing it wrong; it exists only in the present and looks to the future.”

A stolen Gustav Klimt painting may have been found: “Italian police are investigating after a painting believed to be a Gustav Klimt stolen almost 23 years ago was discovered hidden in a wall of the gallery where it had previously been on display.”

Dawkins’s saw—that science and faith are incompatible—is getting rather dull. Rupert Shortt writing in the Times Literary Supplement: “Richard Dawkins’s new book Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide to Atheism is relentlessly confrontational. While discussing it with me, a colleague suggested that the rhetorical tone is itself worthy of note. Dawkins is in effect making a declaration: ‘I understand all this highfalutin science; simple-minded religious believers don’t. Authority therefore resides in me. Here, for instance, is an objective account of embryology which can be contrasted with a religious view – presumably that it’s all a great miracle’. In dialectical terms, Dawkins presses his ‘antithesis’ so hard that the unwary reader may accept the erroneous ‘thesis’ (namely that believers swallow a lot of bilge) from which we must apparently recoil. One result is that he is over-eager to police the notion of wonder . . . My sense (shared by some of his fellow scientists speaking privately to me) is that notwithstanding a careless choice of language in the past, Dawkins was and remains reductionist in outlook. But the scientific consensus has moved on.” 

Walker Percy’s book Symbol and Existence, which languished in the archives at Chapel Hill, has been published for the first time. Here’s my review.

Essay of the Day:

In Commentary, Naomi Schaefer Riley writes about why many mothers with graduate degrees stay home:

“It’s been more than 15 years since New York Times Magazine writer Lisa Belkin made a splash with her article called ‘The Opt-Out Revolution,’ about educated mothers dropping out of high-powered positions to stay at home and raise their children. Depending on their place on the political spectrum, readers were either comforted or horrified by Belkin’s report: ‘Wander into any Starbucks in any Starbucks kind of neighborhood in the hours after the commuters are gone. See all those mothers drinking coffee and watching over toddlers at play? If you look past the Lycra gym clothes and the Internet-access cellphones, the scene could be the ’50s, but for the fact that the coffee is more expensive and the mothers have M.B.A.’s.’

“Belkin’s suggestion that America’s wealthiest and most educated couples are also the ones with the most old-fashioned domestic arrangements has been confirmed in numerous ways. The well-to-do are the most likely to get married, the least likely to divorce, and the most likely to find men earning more than women. The idea that women’s M.B.A.s turned out to be of no more use than the MRS degrees that their mothers and grandmothers received was more than many people could bear.

“A recent study found that about 20 percent of college mothers with children under 18 have opted out or are at home full-time. Around 30 or 40 percent of mothers with degrees from elite schools have at some point taken a sustained break from work. Among Harvard Business School alumnae, 30 percent had at some point been at home full-time.

“But the time in which we have children at home is actually only a fraction of our working lives. So Pamela Stone and Meg Lovejoy—scholars at the City University of New York and Harvard respectively, whose work formed the basis for the original Belkin article—set out to learn what became of these Lululemon-clad former management consultants after their kids got older.

“The first thing they found was that the opt-out revolutionaries stayed home longer than they had originally planned. Before having kids, many women imagine that they will take time off from work when the kids are little. They want to see the first steps, hear the first words. And they want to see their kids before early bedtimes. And, by the way, full-time child care is pretty expensive.

“What these moms discovered, though, is that older kids also benefit from having their parents around more. And parents often find their older kids enjoyable.”

Read the rest.

Photos: Amsterdam Light Festival

Receive Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.