Johann Sebastian Bach is one of history’s three greatest composers (along with Beethoven and Mozart), but his fame didn’t really blossom until the mid-19th century—75 or 80 years after his death. That fact contains both sadness (that he never enjoyed the fame he deserved) and joy (that his name rings out around the world and across the centuries). … I’ll share the stories of a handful of mid-20th century folk/pop musicians whose fame (in selected circles) was similarly deferred—along with some clips of their music.

That started me thinking about other arenas and other examples of late fame. I think the quintessential one is Van Gogh, who struggled tremendously in his life (from some unspecified and episodic mental illness, among other things like poverty) and sold very few paintings, although more than the one painting of legend:

We don’t know exactly how many paintings Van Gogh sold during this lifetime, but in any case, it was more than a couple. Vincent’s first commission was from his uncle Cor. He was an art dealer and wanted to help his nephew on his way, so he ordered 19 cityscapes of The Hague.

Vincent sold his first painting to the Parisian paint and art dealer Julien Tanguy, and his brother Theo successfully sold another work to a gallery in London. The Red Vineyard, which Vincent painted in 1888, was bought by Anna Boch, the sister of Vincent’s friend Eugène Boch.

Without the help of his brother Theo, Van Gogh would have been even worse off. But things were bad enough, and he killed himself at the age of thirty-seven in 1890. Now Van Gogh is one of the most popular artists ever, whose work fetches astronomical prices at auction.

But I think it’s somewhat of a myth that he was a complete failure in his lifetime. From his Wiki entry, I was surprised to see that he did have more recognition during his lifetime that I’d previously known, plus he was acknowledged with at least some praise and acknowledgement shortly after his death:

After Van Gogh’s first exhibitions in the late 1880s, his reputation grew steadily among artists, art critics, dealers and collectors. In 1887, André Antoine hung Van Gogh’s alongside works of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, at the Théâtre Libre in Paris; some were acquired by Julien Tanguy. In 1889, his work was described in the journal Le Moderniste Illustré by Albert Aurier as characterised by “fire, intensity, sunshine”. Ten paintings were shown at the Société des Artistes Indépendants, in Brussels in January 1890. French president Marie François Sadi Carnot was said to have been impressed by Van Gogh’s work.

After Van Gogh’s death, memorial exhibitions were held in Brussels, Paris, The Hague and Antwerp. His work was shown in several high-profile exhibitions, including six works at Les XX; in 1891, there was a retrospective exhibition in Brussels. In 1892, Octave Mirbeau wrote that Van Gogh’s suicide was an “infinitely sadder loss for art … even though the populace has not crowded to a magnificent funeral, and poor Vincent van Gogh, whose demise means the extinction of a beautiful flame of genius, has gone to his death as obscure and neglected as he lived.”

Van Gogh’s fame and reputation started to build in the early years of the 20th century and he became quite famous in mid-century. So it did take a while for him to reach his present mega-fame.

Another example of a very different kind that comes to mind is Ignaz Semmelweis, who’s not really what you’d call a household name even now. But he was disgraced in his lifetime and rehabilitated only after death:

In 1847, he proposed hand washing with chlorinated lime solutions at Vienna General Hospital’s First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors’ wards had thrice the mortality of midwives’ wards. The maternal mortality rate dropped from 18% to less than 2%, and he published a book of his findings, Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever, in 1861.

Despite his research, Semmelweis’s observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. He could offer no theoretical explanation for his findings of reduced mortality due to hand-washing, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. In the asylum, he was beaten by the guards. He died 14 days later from a gangrenous wound on his right hand that may have been caused by the beating.

His findings earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory of disease, giving Semmelweis’s observations a theoretical and scientific explanation, and Joseph Lister, acting on Pasteur’s research, practised and operated using hygienic methods with great success.

Another extremely well-known example of the “late fame” genre is poet Emily Dickinson, reclusive and nearly unpublished in life but now considered one of the greatest American poets:

Although Dickinson was a prolific writer, only 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime.Today her poems are widely regarded as groundbreaking with their use of short acerbic lines, lean descriptions, and slant or off-rhyme. Her poetry primarily deals with nature and mortality.

One thing all three – Van Gogh, Semmelweis, and Dickinson – had in common was that their work was unconventional for the times, trailblazing even. It took the passage of time for them to be appreciated. I’ll let Dickinson have the last word:

Success is counted sweetest,
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purpose Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of Victory

As he defeated – dying –
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!

The post The phenomenon of late fame appeared first on The New Neo.

I’m not that old, but pedagogical practices in my youth seem absolutely archaic compared to whatever passes for education these days. For starters, we had Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday, and they were on their actual real birthdays: Lincoln on February 12, and Washington on February 22.

Two days off! But they didn’t necessarily fall on Mondays; they fell whenever they fell, and sometimes – alas – they fell on a Saturday or a Sunday.

We also had to memorize terrible patriotic poetry back then, and lots of it. When I say “terrible” I’m not referring to its patriotism, I mean that it just wasn’t very good poetry. I suppose kids weren’t supposed to care about that aspect of it. Also, in those days I was very quick at memorizing poetry and so those early poems have tended to stick. Therefore I have a relatively large bank of memorized doggerel to draw on.

One of those poems was about George Washington. To give you an idea of the flavor of what I’m talking about, it started this way: “Only a baby, fair and small…” and then filled the reader in on all the stages of Washington’s life, verse by verse. I had never looked it up online and was skeptical that it could be found, but voila! Here it is; isn’t the internet great?

And I now present it to you as an example of what the New York City schoolchild used to have to memorize and recite. I seem to recall this was in fifth grade:

Only a baby, fair and small,
Like many another baby son,
Whose smiles and tears came swift at call,
Who ate and slept and grew – that’s all,
The infant Washington.

I’ll let you go to the site and see it for yourself. The next verse is for the schoolboy Washington, then we have the lad Washington, then finally man/patriot and a lot of generalities with the only specifics being “surveyor, general, president.” Why so much emphasis on Washington’s boyhood I don’t know; maybe to go with the cherry tree story. But still, at least we were taught to think highly of Washington.

And Lincoln had a poem for memorization, too. It was a better effort than the Washington one, I think, although still not very good and rather creepy at that. I see now that the poem was by Rosemary Benet, apparently the wife of Stephen Vincent Benet.

I have no idea why the poem they had us memorize about Lincoln was not about his accomplishments at all, but rather about the mother who died when he was nine years old. In the poem, she comes back as a ghost and inquires about him. But here it is:

If Nancy Hanks
Came back as a ghost,
Seeking news
Of what she loved most,
She’d ask first
“Where’s my son?
What’s happened to Abe?
What’s he done?”

“Poor little Abe,
Left all alone.
Except for Tom,
Who’s a rolling stone;
He was only nine,
The year I died.
I remember still
How hard he cried.”

“Scraping along
In a little shack,
With hardly a shirt
To cover his back,
And a prairie wind
To blow him down,
Or pinching times
If he went to town.”

“You wouldn’t know
About my son?
Did he grow tall?
Did he have fun?
Did he learn to read?
Did he get to town?
Do you know his name?
Did he get on?”

The urge that rose in me was to shout, “Yes, YES, don’t you know?” into the void.

Instead of that one, we might have been asked to memorize this poem – or at least the very last part of it, which I’ve always liked:

And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down
As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs,
Goes down with a great shout upon the hills,
And leaves a lonesome place against the sky.

Or what about this old chestnut by Walt Whitman? Schmaltzy, but it still gives me a little shiver when I read it:

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

The post President’s Day poetry appeared first on The New Neo.

The 250th anniversary of America’s founding provides an opportunity to reflect on—and fight over—the country’s extraordinary story. Unfortunately, many of the serious scholars who study America—its history, literature and culture—fail to provide a balanced and nuanced account of the country’s complex tale. …

… [W]e found only one part of this narrative presented in most of almost 100 articles we examined from over a three-year period in American Quarterly, the flagship journal of the American Studies Association. Published by Johns Hopkins University, it’s widely considered the country’s premier journal of American studies.

The journal’s scholarship paints a one-sided and unrelentingly negative portrait of the U.S. We found that 80% of articles published between 2022 and 2024 were critical of America, 20% were neutral, and none were positive. Of the 96 articles we examined, our research identified 77 as critical, focused on American racism, imperialism, classism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia. Some articles went to absurd lengths to identify sins. One essay posited that thermodynamics—the science dealing with the relationship between energy, heat, work and temperature—is “an abstract settler-capitalist theory that influenced the plunder of Indigenous lands and lives.”

Is it any wonder that so many young people are so down on this country? Although I must say that most of the old people I know are also reflexively critical of America.

This would be a good time to revisit a passage written by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind, back in the 1980s. In it, he describes an incident he experienced when he was in school in the 1940s. Here you can see the naive origins of the kind of thinking that’s now rampant in academia:

Civic education turned away from concentrating on the Founding to concentrating on openness based on history and social science. There was even a general tendency to debunk the Founding, to prove the beginnings were flawed in order to license a greater openness to the new. What began in Charles Beard’s Marxism and Carl Becker’s historicism became routine. We are used to hearing the Founders being charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests. I asked my first history professor in the university, a very famous scholar, whether the picture he gave us of George Washington did not have the effect of making us despise our regime. “Not at all,” he said, “it doesn’t depend on individuals but on our having good democratic values.” To which I rejoined, “But you just showed us that Washington was only using those values to further the class interests of the Virginia squirearchy.” He got angry, and that was the end of it. He was comforted by a gentle assurance that the values of democracy are part of the movement of history and did not require his elucidation or defense. He could carry on his historical studies with the moral certitude that they would lead to greater openness and hence more democracy. The lessons of fascism and the vulnerability of democracy, which we had all just experienced, had no effect on him.

And I’ll close with a verse from Robert Frost, first published in 1947:

A CASE FOR JEFFERSON

Harrison loves my country too,
But wants it all made over new.
He’s Freudian Viennese by night.
By day he’s Marxian Muscovite.
It isn’t because he’s Russian Jew.
He’s Puritan Yankee through and through.
He dotes on Saturday pork and beans.
But his mind is hardly out of his teens:
With him the love of country means
Blowing it all to smithereens
And having it all made over new.

The post Anti-American studies appeared first on The New Neo.

The number of church members in Germany is falling rapidly. In 2024 alone, the two major churches lost over a million Christians due to people leaving the church or dying. Currently, more than 45% of Germans still belong to either to the Protestant Church in Germanyor the Catholic Church. Thirty years ago, that figure stood at almost 69%. This is why churches are now being deconsecrated or desacralized.

… In response to a DW inquiry, the German Bishops’ Conference informed of the closing and decommissioning of 611 Catholic churches between 2000 and 2024. The Protestant Church estimates that some 300 to 350 churches were permanently shut in the same period; more precise figures are not available.

And what happens to former houses of worship? In some cities, especially in Berlin, growing Orthodox Christian congregations have taken over church buildings. But that remains the exception. …

Some are repurposed. In Jülich, a town between Cologne and Aachen, bicycles are now sold in the former Catholic St. Rochus Church. Thomas Oellers moved his business, Toms Bike Center, into the church building. …

In Wettringen, just north of Münster, an abbey has been transformed into a “soccer church” where footballs are knocked about. In Kleve, the former Protestant Church of the Resurrection serves as a boxing arena. Former churches now house pubs, libraries and book stores. Entire cloisters have even been turned into hotel complexes. In Düsseldorf, a hotel has retained its traditional name Mutterhaus (Mother House) in a nod to its original use as a convent for nuns.

In times of housing shortages, there are more and more cases of architects converting church buildings into residential buildings. In Berlin, Rostock, Trier, Cologne and Wuppertal, for example.

Which makes me think of the Philip Larkin poem “Churchgoing.” It was written in 1954, which is a long time ago, indicating that this trend has been going on for a considerable time. You can find the entire poem here, and I call your attention to the fact that in the poem the speaker has been bicycling, and stops in an empty church to take a look: “Hatless, I take off/My cycle-clips in awkward reverence …”

Here’s a longer excerpt:

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

And then of course there’s a poem written about a hundred years earlier than that (probably in 1851) by Matthew Arnold, and entitled “Dover Beach. I wrote at some length about the poem in this post. The stanza that is particularly apt:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

I believe that Arnold was speaking of Christianity and of Europe, and he sensed what was coming there or what had already begun. He seemed to have seen the trend:

In an 1869 letter to his mother, he wrote:

“My poems represent, on the whole, the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century, and thus they will probably have their day as people become conscious to themselves of what that movement of mind is, and interested in the literary productions which reflect it. It might be fairly urged that I have less poetical sentiment than Tennyson and less intellectual vigour and abundance than Browning; yet because I have perhaps more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and have more regularly applied that fusion to the main line of modern development, I am likely enough to have my turn as they have had theirs.”

Stefan Collini regards this as “an exceptionally frank, but not unjust, self-assessment. … Arnold’s poetry continues to have scholarly attention lavished upon it, in part because it seems to furnish such striking evidence for several central aspects of the intellectual history of the nineteenth century, especially the corrosion of ‘Faith’ by ‘Doubt’. No poet, presumably, would wish to be summoned by later ages merely as an historical witness, but the sheer intellectual grasp of Arnold’s verse renders it peculiarly liable to this treatment.”

Indeed.

The post Modern dilemmas: what to do with those empty churches appeared first on The New Neo.

Please let me know if the website has any glitches – it wouldn’t be unheard of, since I’m my own web developer and designer. One possible glitch I’m seeing: make sure the order has the correct number of books.

The poems are as varied as Gerard’s thoughts and interests: love, time, death, birth, family, the universe and man’s relation to it, the beginnings of life, and more. You can find more information at the link.

The post You can now buy <i>INTO THE SMOKE OF THE WORLD</i>, the book of Gerard Van der Leun’s poetry [scroll down for new posts, because I’ve pinned this one] appeared first on The New Neo.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

I’ve posted that poem or parts of it many times on this blog. But unfortunately, it seems more appropriate than ever. I’ve never quite understood why Yeats uses the term “mere” to modify “anarchy” – is it ironic? But I won’t quibble with a masterpiece, written in 1919, over a hundred years ago.

I left out the first two lines, but they matter too:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

To me, this suggests not only that things are spinning out of control, but that the guiding principle has been lost. From the poem’s Wiki page:

[Yets] saw the age of classical antiquity as beginning with the Trojan War and then that thousand year cycle was overtaken by the Christian era, which is coming to a close. And that is the basis of the final line of the poem: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

I’ve long thought the answer is: Islamic bloodlust and revenge. Although then again, that’s certainly nothing new. How about “Islamic jihadist bloodlust and revenge, and the abdication of so many Western governments to a takeover by lies and a failure to protect the west’s previous values and present-day populations”?

The Jews are just the proverbial canaries in the coal mine, but so many people don’t see that. As writer Guy Goldstein (a man who grew up in Australia) writes, in a Substack essay entitled, “Can I Still Call Australia Home?”:

As I see the footage of the memorials [in Australia], I see Jews standing alone, a spectacle that the rest of Australia is watching. I see people talking about the impact on the Jewish Community, and what this means for Jews. I don’t hear anyone talking about Australians. I see politicians coming to politic, I see a few locals coming to spectate, what I don’t see is Australians embracing Australians. No “We are one, but we are many”.

This past few years has felt like something more than just a local conflict in the Middle East for Jews around the world. Watching my people being gunned down in Australia, I finally understood what it was. They have undone the emancipation of the Jews. The Jews have been restored to their rightful place as “other” in the eyes of the West.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve been a citizen your entire life. It doesn’t matter that you’ve been Australian your entire life. You’re a Jew now. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been American your entire life. It doesn’t matter that you bleed red, white, and blue. You’re a Jew now.

We see it in France. We see this in the UK. As an Australian, I never imagined that it would happen to us. I never imagined that the land that my grandmother worshipped as the font of all that is good in humanity, as her saviour and her true love, would turn into exactly the place that my family had to flee.

I don’t agree that this is true in the United States. Not yet, and I hope never. But it’s getting closer – too close for comfort. And if the bell tolls for the Jews, it tolls for thee.

The post What a weekend: mere anarchy appeared first on The New Neo.

A preview of the cover:

The post Progress on the poetry book appeared first on The New Neo.

Dream on.

Then it seemed highly likely it would be ready by December 1. But then I ran into printer troubles. Trust me – you don’t want to hear the details. So the following is a very quick summary.

I didn’t want to use the print company I’d used for The Name In the Stone, even though I liked the quality of that book, because I wanted a company that would also do the mailings. I found such a company, but the quality of the photos in their proof copy was substandard. So I went back to the original company and ordered a proof from them, thinking I’d figure out a way to deal with the mailings but at least I was pretty sure the print quality would be excellent.

Today I got that proof in the mail, and the quality of the photos was bad. It was completely different from The Name In the Stone, which they had printed for me about a year ago. When I called the company to find out what’s going on, I discovered a little factoid they’d neglected to mention earlier: some time during that year, they had changed their printing machines. Often, when people make a change of that sort, it’s an improvement. They’re not even contending that this was an improvement; it was a downgrade.

Needless to say, I’m unhappy about this. I ended up ordering one more proof from them, though, this time with a different kind of paper they said should help approximate the photo quality of the essay book from last year. I wonder, but I guess I’ll find out.

I still think the poetry book might be ready before the holidays, which was certainly my original plan. But maybe not. I think it’s more important to get it looking right than to rush it for the holidays.

The post And then there’s the poetry book appeared first on The New Neo.

It’s important to find a pot big enough. The prep requires a lot of cutting of carrots and other veggies. The cooking takes many hours, and then there’s the taking the meat off the bones once it’s pretty much falling apart. In go leftover green beans and a bit of leftover stuffing (most of the stuffing was demolished on Thanksgiving Day). Hey, let’s even dump in a scoop of leftover mashed sweet potatoes for thickening, and a spoonful of cranberry sauce. Why not? Gravy, too. Be creative – in the end, it always tastes good. And the rest of the turkey meat – there’s plenty more – makes turkey salad sandwiches for days.

While I’m doing that, I want to remind you to use the Amazon portal here for Amazon gifts. You might be interested in this book by Eric Trump; I haven’t read it, but I heard him interviewed about it. It’s an account of what the Trump family went through during the years out of power and under siege – which is the book’s title.

But I also especially want to remind you that Gerard Vanderleun’s essay book, still available through the Vanderleun Books website here, is a handsome volume that makes an entertaining read and is a great gift (if I do say so myself, which I do). It’s not political, so you can even give it to liberals on your list. There are only a couple of hardcovers left, but there are plenty of non-flimsy paperbacks.

What’s more, pretty soon the Vanderleun poetry book will be available. I know I’ve said that before, and I was hoping it would be ready by November 1. But I ran into unforeseen formatting trouble and once that was fixed I ran into some difficulties with the printer. Now I’m awaiting book proofs from two different printers, and once I make that decision – hopefully in a week or even less – I’ll make the big announcement that it’s ready for ordering.

The post On turkey soup and books for sale appeared first on The New Neo.

It turns out that formatting poetry in order to create a print hardcopy book is much more difficult than formatting prose for the same type of book. I won’t get into the descriptive weeds here and detail the problems it presents, and why. But suffice to say that, for example, if you look at a poetry book, not only do the lines have to be just so, but the margins can change dramatically from poem to poem in the book. Writing and book formatting programs often have unforeseen problems with this – unforeseen by me, anyway. For most of my life I’ve been reading poetry books and never noticed the intricacies of their printing. I sure do now.

I think – accent on the think – I’ve found an acceptable work-around. But it will take quite a few more hours.

I’m just venting here.

The post Formatting angst appeared first on The New Neo.