Tina brown

 Was a force in the magazine publishing industry. I ‘came across’ her during her time at The New Yorker when I read magazines, Sunday’s newspaper supplements, Esquire, The  New Republic, there were a lot of good magazines. They weren’t as hot as the daily racing form which is still in print but they were certainly better than daytime network TV.

But back to Tina Brown and how she charged me up recently.

She has 4 George Polk Awards (from L. I. U.), 5 Overseas Press Club Awards, 10 Magazine Editor Awards.

She charged me up with interviews on TV for her book on the Royals.  About her time at The New Yorker: Ms. Brown said “there were people you couldn’t get out the door”. 

Interviewer: “print journalism in ten years?”.  Tina Brown “They need to create Buzz”.

Thank you Tina, you got me charged up.  So I went out Saturday looking for magazines. First choices Granta, The New York Review of books and Three penny review. I found The New York Review of Books only.  Then opened it up and … first review got me. Truly the very first review, I took notes.  here goes. The review

Wimple Networks by Marina Warner

Reviewing: Relations of Power: Women’s Networks in the Middle Ages, edited by Emma O. Berat, Rebecca Hardie, and Irina Dumitrescu

From Reviewer: “Network theory is a child of the digital age: a quantitative approach to literary criticism that depends on computer modeling of exchanges and relationships in a text. Think flight paths across the globe: the busy hubs (Heathrow O’Hare and Perry’s )show up on a map as dense clusters, with hundreds of arcs springing from them in to the destinations they serve, filling out toward less frequented places.”

“Likewise network theory takes a novel or a play and plots the characters actions and encounters on a graph: in the jargon, each actor is known as a node or a vertex while interactions with others are represented by edges.  Computer algorithms can apply to literature”

From the book “the past just as visible as the present that is one major change introduced by the use of networks. Then, they make visible specific regions within the plot as a whole: sub-systems, that share some significant property.”

 Over five charts breaking down the networks in Hamlet, Moretti reveals Claudius as the towering twin all of the play embedded in the thick cluster constituted by the court of Elsinore by contrast a character like Horacio Hamlet’s friend and someone of crucial psychological importance to him drops to the periphery of the grap

.Franco Moretti, “Network Theory, Plot Analysis,” New Left Review, March/April 2011

Time flattened into space.

The reviewer: “Teaching students nurtured on Google, it’s often worrying how weak their grasp of chronology is: the Cybersphere may be geographically vast and marvelously interconnected, but it is happening in an eternal present.” 

Back to the book:

Plotting the network of their relationships reveals that these women enjoyed “betweenness centrality,” Network jargon for connectivity, between subjects who appear in multiple instances of intervention, mediation, and peacemaking. Ethelddreda, who ranked 31st when considered on her own according to number of mentions, jumps up to 14th place when her position in the network of relations is represented in a graph.  The writers claim this reveals her influence at a deeper level.

Etc. the reviewer is not happy with the method but the substance of the book fascinates, e.g.

“In The period covered by Relations of Power, the church proves to be hospitable to women ambitious to manage their own estates, but at the cost of surrendering the right to movement, sex, marriage and children.

“In the long term the nuns resolve was in vain: these great Abbeys were stripped and razed in the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536-1541; only a curfew tower remains at Barking, the ruins of St. Mary’s Church at Wilton and a single soaring arch of the medieval priory at Walsingham, once the wealthiest pilgrimage site in England. 

The reviewer remembers “ those ripe, richly tapestried and stirring psychological dramas of the Middle Ages by novelists such as Anya Seton, Geoffrey Trease, and Rosemary Sutcliff” which she read as a girl and Toni Morrison, Hilary Mantel, and Lauren Groff today.

Lastly, she mentions Ted Hughes exploration of the erasure of female power in his monumental, erratic, study “Shakespeare and the Goddess of Supreme Being”. 

Thank you, Tina, I’m buzzed.