Morning roundup …

… courtesy of Dave Lull.

… The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography, by Alan Jacobs | Books | Times Higher Education.

Alan Jacobs calls The Book of Common Prayer “an instrument of social and political control”, but underplays its political dimensions in favour of an elaborate account of its reception as a religious text. Evangelical contemporaries objected to Cranmer countenancing kneeling at Communion. For John Knox this was tantamount to idolatry. Cranmer’s own equating of transubstantiation with idolatry was one of the “doctrinal errors” for which he was executed.

… on Permission, poems by Katie Peterson (New Issues).

[Peterson] is a poet of necessary disequilibrium. With stubborn persistence, each poem struggles for balance, usually resulting in a draw between the limitations of personal comprehension and a vast naturalness of automatic being in the surround, often depicted in minutiae. A yearning for expansion of spirit ends up (almost) settling for the yearning itself. Remarkably, her poem-endings often echo this compromise yet strike the reader as quite various in what they notice or their manner of insistence.

… From Muse to amusement: Absinthe: How the Green Fairy became literature’s drink.

… Reprise: Benny Goodman 1938 concert revived.

… Size counts. From Bryan Appleyard: The long tail cut short: the economics of blockbuster capitalism.

…  the general point is credible: that big companies have tamed the market anarchy of the internet. When we think of the web now, we don’t think of a bustling marketplace of small traders; we think of Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook. The gold rush has turned into the same old land-grab.

… Q&A: A Strange Composition: Classical Music Meets Bioterror In 'Orfeo'.

[Richard] Powers says he identifies with composers who are struggling to make complex, compelling works. "This balancing act between wanting to make it new and wanting to make it loved and beautiful is familiar to me," he tells NPR's Audie Cornish. "It's something that I've been wrestling with over the course of 11 novels and close to 30 years now. You write the kind of book that you wish you could find on the shelf somewhere, and you wait for someone who has the time and the focus and the desire to go deeper and to read a new story."