On the Shelf

Triumphantly, Brilliantly Kaleidoscopic, and Other News

April 22, 2016 | by Jeffery Gleaves

San Francisco City Hall, April 21, 2016. Photo via Instagram: alightningrod

Prince died yesterday at fifty-seven at his home, Paisley Park, in Chanhassen, MN. The nation mourns. Tributes pour in: Minnesota Public Radio has dedicated its waves exclusively to the artist; purple rain adorns next week’s New Yorker cover; San Francisco lit its City Hall with the royal hue; and MTV, who hasn’t played a music video in years, aired nothing but the late musician’s work and his movie, “Purple Rain,” yesterday. “His music was a cornucopia of ideas: triumphantly, brilliantly kaleidoscopic.”

As it turns out, Soviet production novels, that humorless subgenre of yore, followed a pretty basic pattern: “an outsider arrives at a factory or construction site and has to figure out how to solve a morale problem or increase productivity: Ivan Alexandrovich has to supervise the building of a hydroelectric plant or Sofia Alexandrovna has to increase production at the textile mill. They are, along with Elizabethan masques and vice-presidential autobiographies, one of the most arid literary genres ever devised.”

Any young person working in publishing today ought to know a little about the history of fonts. If you, like me, feel your knowledge is lacking, I offer you a not-so-brief history of roman fonts. “The Carolingian or Caroline minuscule joined forces with antique Roman square capitals at the very beginning of the fifteenth century—a conjunction willed by the great Florentine humanists; their forms first wrought in metal by two German immigrants at Subiaco and Rome, honed by a Frenchman, and consummated at the hands of Griffo of Bologna and Aldus the Venetian. A thousand years after the fall of the Roman Empire, the romans returned and re-conquered.”

Today is the four-hundredth anniversary of Cervantes’s death. Before he wrote Don Quixote,Cervantes was kidnapped by pirates and imprisoned in the Algiers for five years, a life-defining moment that influenced his writing: “I would argue that Cervantes’s explicit interest in the question of madness emerges from the borderline situations he endured as a captive, from the encounter with death that transformed him into a survivor. [It] converts him into a pioneer in the exploration of the psyche three centuries before Freud.”

You know who else passed away this week four-hundred years ago? Shakespeare. To celebrate The Bard, NPR spoke with Shakespeare scholars, dramaturges, and Victorian food experts to bring you a series of delightful essays on his relation to food, which have surprising linguistic and gastronomical insights: “When Hamlet huffs about the ‘funeral baked meats’ served at his mother's wedding banquet, he is chastising her for her quick re-marriage, implying that she was serving leftovers from his father's recent funeral. But funeral baked meats were in fact a real food, and they weren't as macabre as their name implied—though they were cooked in a ‘coffin.’ The same word was used for “a coffer to keep dead people or to keep meat in,” explains Ken Albala, director of food studies at the University of the Pacific. But these edible coffins, he explains, were made of pastry crust to to seal the contents so that they lasted longer. Because that pastry was built to act more like Tupperware than a treat, it was coarse and tossed rather than eaten.”

TAGS Don Quixote, Fonts, food, funeral baked meats, Hamlet, imprisonment, memorial, Miguel de Cervantes, music, NPR, pirates, Prince, purple, Shakespeare, Soviet, typography


